Helena Rubinstein used guile, brilliant branding, and more than a few falsehoods to lift cosmetics from an accessory for prostitutes to a desired luxury item. Geoffrey Jones reveals her history.
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This study assesses a values-based 360° performance measurement system implemented at an Indian retail chain that led to improvements on financial performance, but not on desired non-financial dimensions.

Analyzing data from a Chinese manufacturing company, this study explores side effects of subjective performance evaluations in a setting where workers are rewarded based on performance rankings and subject to both rewards and penalties. Among other contributions the paper highlights factors that could impact the overall effectiveness of incentive systems.

When a business known for delivering an exemplary customer experience faces cutbacks, what services get chopped? Assistant Professor Susanna Gallani discusses a recent case study about an airline that looks not just to survive a downturn but emerge stronger.
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Organizations often create initiatives to encourage adoption of new behaviors, or to stimulate performance improvements from existing practices. This research explores whether and how incentivized behaviors at a California hospital persist beyond the duration of the initiative.

Every CEO is different, as is every company. So why does one executive compensation package tend to look just like another? The answer lies in the prevalence of interlocking directorates and the use of compensation consultants, according to research by Susanna Gallani.
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Designing the compensation package for a CEO is a complex task with many variables and uncertainties. While in principle the structure of executive compensation should be directed to aligning the goals of the executive with the strategic goals of the firm, the adoption of common models of compensation may tilt the compensation structure away from this alignment. It is thus important to identify the drivers of compensation similarity across firms. In this paper the author identifies such drivers – above and beyond known economic and governance characteristics of the firm – by providing evidence that firms connected through board networks or hiring common compensation consultants exhibit greater similarity in the structure of CEO compensation. At the same time, however, different networks influence different aspects of the compensation design.